Kevin Rudd mutters oppositional noises over the Iraq war, but insists that Afghanistan is "Terror Central". The American Democrats agree. Afghanistan is "the good war". As with Iraq, these are bare-faced lies that only serve to justify the ongoing carnage created by the invasion.

Rudd promises a Labor government will be "there for the long haul" - and will send more troops. This is his response to the fact that as in Iraq, life in occupied Afghanistan is getting worse - an extraordinary feat in a country that has already suffered decades of bloody wars and dictatorship.

Life expectancy for Afghans has fallen since the invasion to around 44.5 years. The country has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world - one in five children will die before their fifth birthday. The UN Development Project reports that nearly 40 per cent of the population in urban areas has no access to clean drinking water.

Unemployment in the capital Kabul is estimated to be between 50 to 70 per cent, with half a million people homeless. The Red Cross estimates that 80,000 people have been driven from their homes in the south, where the fighting is most intense.

If, as Rudd tells us, the war in Afghanistan is about winning hearts and minds, the obvious conclusion would be to ensure that developmental aid improved this situation. And Rudd has time and again lauded the reconstructive efforts of "our" troops.

But what little aid has been promised has mostly disappeared straight into the coffers of US and other foreign corporations.

Action Aid, a Johannesburg NGO, reports that 47 per cent of the money that the US claims as aid to Afghanistan is spent on "technical assistance" (overpriced US contractors). On top of this, 70 per cent is tied to conditions requiring that it be spent on US goods (for example, arms). Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of US aid is actually going straight back to US corporations.

When Laura Bush went to Kabul for a media stunt, the New York Times claimed that her mission was "to promise long-term commitment from the United States to education for women and children." Speaking in Kabul, she pledged that the United States would give an additional $17.7 million to support education in Afghanistan. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, that grant had been announced before. Worse, it was not for Afghan education at all but for the new private, for-profit American University of Afghanistan!

What has developed is an obscene spectacle of five-star hotels and state-of-the-art malls to service the needs of foreign dignitaries, contractors, aid agency bosses and opium magnates. Author Christina Lamb describes how "rents are higher here than in much of Manhattan... An agent from the Marco Polo agency who drove me around last month told me his company leases 10 houses to the World Food Program at rents of US$9,000 to $15,000 a month per house. The total comes to more than $1.5 million a year."

As in Iraq, the claims of democratic advances in Afghanistan are nothing but hollow propaganda. There were reports of widespread intimidation in the elections that installed America's favourite, Hamid Karzai. Political parties were banned from running, and the US guaranteed only Karzai funding for election promises.

Today, Karzai is popularly known as the "mayor of Kabul," mocking the fact that the national government has no control outside of the capital. Karzai is heavily dependent on the US for support, although the regular massacres of Afghans by NATO bombings have put him in an increasingly awkward position. Recently, Karzai had to remind NATO that "Afghans are human beings, too."

The Taliban has been replaced with warlords throughout the country. Over half of the members of the Afghan National Assembly are linked to armed groups or have previous records of human rights violations.

The worsening living conditions combined with the indiscriminate aerial bombings carried out by NATO have pushed many Afghans into the Taliban-led resistance. It should be clear how unpopular and devastating the occupation is when it serves as a recruiting tool for the Taliban!

Afghanistan has its Abu Ghraib, the Bagram airbase. The only difference, according to Human Rights Watch, is that the notorious Abu Ghraib prison is at least nominally under the protection of the Geneva Convention. Thousands of Afghans have been detained and many tortured. At least two deaths at Bagram have been ruled homicides by US military doctors.

The European Union's Afghanistan NGO Safety Office found that the number of attacks in June and July this year was 80 to 90 per cent higher than last year, indicating that there has been a general escalation of the conflict rather than the "seasonal fluctuations" that occupation forces suggest. Also, the resistance is now spreading out of the Pashtun south into the east and parts of the centre around Kabul.

All indications are that the war in Afghanistan is being played out just as in Iraq. Devastation of the country's infrastructure, massive increases in poverty, malnutrition and unemployment, indiscriminate killing of civilians and widespread torture and intimidation characterise the occupation. The US relies on allies whose records on human rights and women's rights records are no better than the Taliban's.

The occupation of Afghanistan is being run by the same butchers who have ruined Iraq. And they will continue to destroy Afghanistan as long as they get the bipartisan support that Rudd has promised. It's about time we demanded a government that agreed to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq and Afghanistan - two theatres in the same war

Kevin Rudd denies that Afghanistan and Iraq are "two theatres in the same war." But the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan are not accidental.

The first thing they have in common is the lies that were used to justify the invasions. Ostensibly, the US invaded in order to find Osama bin Laden. But, according to journalist John Pilger, "in late September and early October [2001], leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September 11 attacks." This deal was rejected by the US. Pilger quotes a US official as worrying about "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr bin Laden was captured."

So, if the invasion wasn't about capturing bin Laden, what was the reason? The US invaded Afghanistan as the opening shot in a round of interventions that was meant to reshape the Middle East in its favour, Condoleezza Rice's "new Middle East."

The so-called "war on terror" is simply the ideological justification for American plans to reassert dominance of the world's most strategically important area. The invasion of Afghanistan was the first and a central part of this plan, one that is now coming apart at the seams.

But there is one encouraging similarity with the Iraq war. For the first time since the invasion a majority - 57 per cent according to a Lowy Institute poll in September this year - oppose Australia's role in the occupation. This is in keeping with the majority opinion in Britain, Canada, Italy and Germany, all of whom have troops in Afghanistan.